Content-Based Language Instruction

a product of the Western Consortium of Middle East Studies Centers

Welcome

This site is part of a pilot project to develop content-based language course modules to be used in the instruction of some major Middle East Languages taught in North American institutions of higher education: Arabic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Persian, Turkish. It is a website designed to help university-level language offerings based on various content-areas.

Even though content-based instruction can also be implemented at novice to intermediate-mid levels, the site does not address all levels of language instruction as (1) various teaching materials are more readily available for novice to intermediate-low levels and (2) content-based instruction is more commonly applied at levels intermediate-mid and above. Hence this site includes materials for proficiency levels between intermediate-mid and distinguished, where applicable.

Activities included in this site involve receptive skills, mainly reading and listening, that draw on authentic audio-visual and written sources, either recorded by instructors or harvested from a variety of media with appropriate acknowlegements and copyrights included.

In its preliminary stages the content areas addressed involve those topics that are the least studied and most demanded by government agencies such as business, engineering and urban development. At this point the site does not include topics most commonly or conventionally studied by language students in departments of language, literature, cultural studies and comparative literature programs, or their sister fields from the humanities and social sciences, e.g. cinema, psychology, art history, history, political science, international studies, which ordinarily draw language students. In the future, we envision the site to have materials in these content-areas as well.